1. Technical Field The present invention relates generally to Internet search operations that facilitate Internet searches.
2. Related Art
Simple and short domain names are of high value to buy as they are easy to remember and type directly into network browser for browsing. A domain name is associated with lot of hard work and good will made by company or business firm in gaining the popularity and high value of their brand in the market. Internet squatters and scammers are always looking for these popular domain names. The squatters and scammers engage in unethical misuse of such popular names to divert legitimate Internet traffic to their website. It becomes important to impose disciplinary measures on such on-line conduct to safeguard the interest of the established domain names, businesses, and consumers for which a respective company has worked real hard to achieve a reputation and earn revenue from.
Current whois database servers maintained by their service providers do not provide any protection in safeguarding domain names for their owners. Normally, the records on the whois database servers are derived from the domain name registration system databases. If there is some incorrect record in the domain registration system database, it will be copied to whois database, as it is. Thus, such whois databases will merely become an aggregate of some reformatted records of registered information from a large number of domain name registration databases. Most often, it becomes very difficult or confusing to resolve identical domain names from multiple top-level domains. This is a misleading situation causing loss of business to genuine companies. Such undesirable incidents makes is to that the whois database server is needed accomplish various functionalities beyond what these structures were normally intended to accomplish.
Also, current whois database servers never distinguished between legal and illegal websites. Internet resources and databases will be of limited use if they are not used in large volume. Therefore, while providing access to harvest data in large volume the current whois database servers do not have protection against spammers misusing them. This issue is mainly due to lack of any built-in mechanism that could properly regulate different category of visitors to such whois database servers.
Whois database servers and search engine servers exist on the Internet as independent entities for different purposes and objectives. Current search engines do not perform operations other than searching, and the whois database servers serve only the purpose of facilitating the identification of business firms. Those search engines and whois database servers have never complemented each other or worked together to enhance the quality of various services to their customers.
Current search engines and whois database servers fail to differentiate between legal and illegal websites. Illegal websites are Internet squatters, scammers, and other sources or sites, who take undue advantage of misusing some reputed domain names, and also cause inconvenience to both legal and reputed companies as well as to customers on the Internet. The current search engines fail in identifying, containing, and thwarting unpopular websites, and stopping unwanted sites from appearing top in the search result lists through cautious search algorithms. Search engines with poor search algorithms can cause unwanted sites to appear early in search result lists, and inconvenience for both customers and legitimate business firms whose sites are then listed later on in search result lists. Search engines customers often search for the right products on line, but wind up buying inefficient, pirated, knock-off, imitation, or other products due to the presence of unwanted web squatters and scammers. In the meantime, genuine and honest business firms lose business to squatters and scammers.
Unwanted Internet traffic due to these abuses and during Internet search operations are never addressed by the Internet infrastructure. During the course of many Internet search operations, a lot of unwanted traffic due to squatters, scammers, etc. will be generated along with some genuine traffic. Such unwanted search results are undesirable at least for three main reasons: this causes unwanted traffic and operational costs on Internet causing inconvenience to millions of users and businesses; users fail to get their choice due to huge unwanted search result list being displayed on the screen causing confusion; and finally genuine and ethical companies lose business to unethical business firms on the Internet. Therefore, a need exists to handle these difficulties and challenges.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.